Molotov and Orjonikidze had just written a joint letter to Stalin (September 13, 1929), pleading for newspaper criticism of leading officials to be reined in, but that same day, Stalin wrote back, “I consider your proposal risky in that it could objectively lead to curbing of self-criticism, which is unacceptable.” The next day, he added that “full-on self-criticism activates the mass and creates a state of siege for all and all kinds of bureaucrats. This is a great achievement.”94
Stalin read newspapers assiduously on holiday. After finding an account in Pravda of a mid-September Rykov speech, he erupted in a telegram he sent to Molotov, Voroshilov, and Orjonikidze, making known that at a minimum, he wanted Rykov removed from chairing politburo sessions. (“Can you not put an end to this comedy?”)95 Meanwhile, Nadya wrote to him from Moscow (September 27) that “without you it is very, very boring,” and pleaded, “In a word, come back. It will be nice together. . . . I kiss you firmly, firmly.” She detailed the infighting at the Industrial Academy, where she was studying chemical dyes and synthetic fibers for clothing applications. “Students here are graded as follows: kulak, middle peasant, poor peasant. There is such enormous laughter and argument every day. In a word, they have already put me down as a rightist.”96
Stalin did not react to her naïve “joke” on the touchiest (for him) of subjects in his next letter (September 30), noting only that he would be back in Moscow in a week. On October 3, Britain and the USSR signed a one-page protocol restoring relations, without settling their outstanding disputes, just as Stalin had insisted.97 With his return imminent, he wrote to Molotov (October 6), “It is necessary to think Bukharin will be kicked out of the politburo.”98 Stalin also revealed his prickliness yet again. “For some reason, recently, you have started praising me,” he wrote to Nadya (October 8). “What does this mean? Good, or bad?”99
TREMORS
Stalin had not been abroad since 1913. “How good would it be if you, comrade Stalin, changing appearance, traveled for a certain time abroad with a genuine translator, not a tendentious one,” foreign affairs commissar Georgy Chicherin had recently written. “You would see reality.”100 (Stalin would not set foot outside the USSR until 1943.) The dictator continued to direct intelligence officials to focus on threats posed by Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, as well as the “limitrophes,” the immediate borderland states (Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania). They were reporting what he solicited.101 “The Turkish general staff has received testimony from Germany, Poland, and England that war between the USSR and Poland will happen in early 1930,” one report stated (October 11, 1929), in passages Stalin underlined. “Poland is seriously preparing for war. . . . Rumors are circulating as well among the [military] attachés in Moscow about a war coming soon.”102
Gorky had returned to Sorrento already, and Stalin, back in Moscow, resumed his side of their correspondence via diplomatic pouch. “Things are not going badly here,” he noted (October 24). “We’re moving the cart along; of course, with creaking, but we’re moving forward. . . . They say that you are writing a play about wrecking and that you would not be against receiving related materials. I gathered materials on wrecking and I’ll send them to you presently. . . . How’s your health?”103 Other pressing business included dispatching central functionaries to oversee grain collections in the North Caucasus, Bashkiria, the Central and Lower Volga, and Ukraine.104 Stalin was using the heavy-handed procurements to force peasants into collective farms. He and other regime officials either ignored the disposition of animals altogether or publicly insisted on immediate full socialization. Rather than hand their animals over to the collectives, peasants had been trying to sell them since summer, but markets were flooded and prices had cratered, so the peasants had begun slaughtering animals en masse in protest. The livestock that had been socialized were often up to their knees in dung, and dying.105 A catastrophe was unfolding.
Also on October 24, the United States stock market lost 11 percent of its value at the opening bell. Trading on that “Black Thursday” was heavy, and the ticker tape could not keep up—people had no idea what stocks were worth. Bankers tried to arrest the slide with bulk purchases of blue chips above trading prices. But when the market opened on Monday, it fell 13 percent. “Black Tuesday” (October 29) saw a 12 percent drop amid record trading (a record not broken for four decades), which brought the Dow Jones to 40 percent below the peak it had reached in September. The Wall Street crash came after a speculative boom in which stocks were being purchased at an average price-to-earnings ratio of 32, far above historic levels, thanks partly to the invention of margin buying. When prices dropped, investors could not pay back the loans they had assumed to purchase the stocks. Just one in six U.S. households owned stocks, but the shock provoked business bankruptcies, credit contraction, worker layoffs, and psychological uncertainty. Most remarkable, the weeklong drop in share prices occurred almost instantaneously on all financial markets in the world except Japan—and the Soviet Union, which, of course, did not have a stock market.106
On November 5, 1929, following protracted negotiations between Britain and the Soviet Union, the House of Commons ratified restoration of diplomatic relations by a wide margin (324 to 199).107 Each government continued to accuse the other of treachery, but for Stalin, diplomatic recognition by the world’s “leading imperialist power” denoted acknowledgment of the Five-Year Plan for rapid industrialization.108 That same day, a politburo decree ordered the execution of the OGPU espionage operative Yakov Blyumkin. His fatal act had been to meet on Prinkipo with Trotsky, his former patron, who revealed that he had managed to carry out secret documents, which he intended to publish to expose Stalin, and predicted the regime’s downfall, averring that the underground “Bolshevik-Leninists” needed to strengthen their opposition. Blyumkin evidently sensed that Trotsky was fantasizing, yet he had agreed to carry messages to Moscow from Trotsky, written inside books in invisible ink.109 He became one of the first Communist party members executed by the Soviet regime for a political crime.
A GREAT BREAK
The permanency, or not, of ad hoc regime violence in the countryside was set to be clarified at the year’s second Central Committee plenum, scheduled to open November 10, 1929, and Stalin went on the offensive, with a newspaper article, “The Year of the Great Break,” in Pravda on the revolution’s anniversary (November 7). “We are going full speed ahead by means of industrialization to socialism, leaving behind our traditional ‘Russian’ backwardness,” he declared. “We are becoming a country of metal, a country of the automobile, a country of the tractor.” In the run-up to the plenum, regime officials had begun to boast of fulfilling the Five-Year Plan in just four years, and, at the plenum itself, this would become a “vow” attributed to “the proletariat” and, soon, a ubiquitous slogan—“ 5 in 4.”110 His article predicted giant new farms of 125,000 to 250,000 acres, larger than even the biggest U.S. farms of the time, and insisted that “the peasants are joining collective farms . . . as whole villages, whole counties, whole districts, even sub-provinces”—a supposed movement from below, refuting the rightists. He further boasted that “the country in something like three years will become one of the most grain-rich, if not the most grain-rich, in the world.”111 That would allow for vast grain exports, to pay for imported machinery.112